Creating Trust Within Fiverr’s Community [Interview]

I’ve been working at Fiverr for two years now, and I’m still always amazed by the enormous amount of passion and hard work that every employee, no matter their role or position, puts into the company in order to raise Fiverr’s level of quality.

Safety going together with quality, I thought it was important to share what’s going on behind the scenes, to help you better understand the type of work that is done on a daily basis to keep the marketplace the safe and transparent place we all know.

To do so I went to interview the head of Fiverr’s Safety and Trust Team, Gali Gelber.

Hi Gali! For those who don’t know you, can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

My name is Gali, and I’ve been the head of Trust and Safety at Fiverr since December 2015. Our mission is to maintain a safe and trusted marketplace. We strive to provide the best user experience while protecting our community and increasing the level of integrity and quality at Fiverr.

I truly believe in Fiverr and its message to the freelancer community, and therefore, I am highly committed to my role and see this as my personal mission.

Prior to Fiverr, I led the risk management division at an Israeli risk management consulting group, where we helped some of the largest and most influential organizations in Israel improve their risk and fraud management tools and processes.

I live in Tel Aviv with my partner and 2 adorable sons.

I believe that to build trust among Fiverr’s community, whether buyers or sellers, it takes time and lots of work. How do you proceed in order to understand what your customers’ needs and problems are?

Fiverr is all about its community, and the community’s trust in us means everything.

Gali Gelber, Head of Trust and Safety

“The more Fiverr grows, the more effort we put into ensuring its trustworthiness but also, the most obvious thing is that trust is our top priority.”

We listen to our community needs in all the channels we have available, and we feel their pain when it comes to trust. We do this at a micro level, by handling the specific user and the trust issue he is having, and on the macro level, by adding trust-related features and improving existing features to be more trust-oriented. Additionally, our team constantly monitors and identifies new patterns of abuse and will take actions accordingly. We encourage our community to report any violation as this is helping us with maintaining a trustworthy marketplace.

As mentioned above, I see this as a personal mission to allow this awesome community of buyers and sellers to conduct their business in a safe and trusted environment.

In my eyes, the value aspect behind Fiverr’s marketplace is indisputable for all freelancers and entrepreneurs. What is Fiverr doing to ensure good “Trust and Safety” practices throughout its product development lifecycle?

As trust is something that comes into play in every aspect of the product, my team and the product team are very close partners.

It can be working on features that are entirely trust-related, such as 2-step verification, or reporting options for users or enforcement tools – in these cases, we work together to make sure that we achieve maximum trust with minimum friction to our users. Every step of the way involves protecting information and privacy, as well as ensuring the marketplace is a place for good actors, and weeding out the bad.

Trust and safety are also part of the planning of new features, where we add our trust-related insights to the feature to ensure that it is not being abused and that it will be designed to reflect trust.

We also work with the product team in planning future features based on our experience and insight to reflect the needs of the marketplace.

A letter from Fiverr’s CEO – Micha Kaufman

“In the coming weeks and months, you will see a gradual rollout of new features and product updates that improve the overall product, simplify the experience and raise the quality of our support.” Read the full message …

Fiverr is indisputably growing and will soon occupy 9,400 square feet in Soho, New York. What do you do in order to reduce product friction as the company grows?

Scale is something that we are all aware of, and we are putting a lot of effort into developing tools and teams that can handle scale, with great SLA and an amazing user experience. Fiverr sees its users and their experience as a top priority, and we will ensure that we are able to maintain this no matter how big we are.

Machine learning and automation are certainly important aspects of your team. How important is the human element in order to help Fiverr stay ahead of the negative behaviors or threats it faces?

I think that a good Trust and Safety team is a team that can combine machine learning with the human element to improve accuracy and efficiency, with minimum false positives.

Machine learning has improved a lot during the past years and is a “must-have” tool when it comes to trust, fraud prevention, and moderation. However, I think that the human element is essential as there are a lot of gray areas, and false positives are still one of the main pains in our industry. And hey, someone has to teach the machine :).

It’s clear there’s a crisis of trust brewing in our societies. What is Fiverr doing in order to build transparency among its users?

I find this fascinating as it shows the biggest conflict of our era, where your data is all over the internet and you want to make sure that it is not misused in any way. Fiverr has a strict privacy policy, and our user’s privacy is our top priority.

We want to make sure that our users are operating in a trustworthy marketplace.
We are encouraging our users to discuss and communicate with each other on our platform, so they can discuss conflicts and agree to cancel orders if necessary.
We have an awesome Customer Support team to be there for our users and handle different cases to ensure the happiness of our buyers and sellers.
We have the amazing Trust and Safety team, which is proactively monitoring suspicious activities and responding to everything that is reported to us by our community, from messages and gigs to images and videos.
We keep adding features to allow our users to better report and communicate with us – our users can report messages, orders, or gigs, in a simple and seamless flow, so it can be resolved by our team.
We encourage our community to report any issues to us, so together we can create a trustworthy, clean environment in which our users can conduct their business safely and seamlessly.
We are working together with third parties to remove any service that is violating their TOS and to maintain a marketplace providing professional services by professional, high-quality sellers.
We are constantly working on improving our user’s account experience as well as the security of their funds, by adding verification steps, changes to the flow, prevention, and detection tools.
We want all our users to know that we’ve got their back covered and that even in cases of bad experiences, we will do everything to create a better experience for them.

If you or some of your team members could offer some good tips in regard to safety, what would they be?

Don’t use one password for all sites, especially not for financial ones.
Don’t use passwords like your phone number or date of birth.
Don’t use the same password for PayPal/Payoneer/email.
If you use the internet in a public place, please make sure to log out once you decide to finish your session.
Buyers and sellers – Verify your phone number.
Sellers – Don’t be afraid to look at other gigs for inspiration, but do not copy gigs.
Don’t open suspicious links or attachments you receive unexpectedly – please be sure to report those.
Sellers – please make sure to review our TOS and the Fiverr forums to make sure your gig or the service you are requesting is in alignment with our guidelines.
For buyers – message a seller with more than just saying hello; they know you are here to buy, and you know they are here to sell. Be formal but more direct.
Clarity is key:

As a seller – Make sure your gig description is concise and specific to what service you are offering. Vague descriptions only detract from your potential customer base.
As a buyer – make sure you are clear in what you are requesting.

Please use our reporting tools; they are there for you to help us help you.
It is recommended to contact the seller before placing an order, to make sure expectations are set to avoid any misunderstanding.
Please avoid communicating outside of Fiverr. We will not be able to protect you if anything goes wrong.
If something doesn’t feel right in an order or in conversation with another user, please don’t hesitate to contact our Customer Support Team.

Conclusion

Fiverr is a marketplace that is continuously evolving and expanding, attracting more and more buyers and sellers on a daily basis. Therefore, the more that Fiverr grows the more that must be done to help the community work together safely, and build trust with one another.

That said, we also need your help to strive for excellence. So, whenever you encounter difficulties, please keep in mind that you’re not alone. There is a team of professionals working hard to help you solve each conflict, and make your Fiverr experience exceptional.

Any suggestions or ideas you would like to share? Please don’t hesitate to leave your comments below.

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